The early Redbird….

…..creates the ear-worm.

Do you know those sayings ‘such-and-such is as such-and-such does’ and ‘such-and-such as the day is long’?  They are examples of sayings which are meaningless and yet manage to say so much nonetheless.

They are also phrases that are used as a basis for a wonderfully quirky little song called Lovely as the Day Is Long from an album called Redbird.  This song has been accompanying me as a so-called ear-worm for the past few days.  But I found it to be really rather friendly.  Not one of those dire and annoying ear-worms that one can get some times (Kum Ba Yah, anyone?! :)).

Anyway, the music has been written by a trio of artists – Jeffery Foucault, Kris Delmhorst and Peter Mulvey – who spent a lot of time touring together and decided to put together a few tracks while on the road.  They wrote the whole album in three days.  I was so interested to read about the background to the making of this work because one of the things I was planning to write about in the post as I listened to the album was how intimate the music seemed – you feel like you are sitting right next to the musicians, perhaps with some kind of percussion instrument in your hand waiting to join in.  And then I read in the Wiki entry for the album that ‘it was recorded on a DAT recorder with one stereo microphone in a living room’.  I don’t mean at all that it is poor quality – far from it.  But there is a wonderful sense of directness and clarity, with nothing spoilt by any editing or ‘over-producing’.

Here’s another track from the album so that you can see what I mean – ships is more representative of most of the music they have produced.  Folky, edgy, beautiful and overall a little gem.